The August 2015 global outage: locked out worldwide by 'routine internal maintenance'
August 2015
On 30 August 2015 Dropbox suffered a worldwide outage that locked users out of their files; the company blamed an issue that arose during routine internal maintenance.
What happened
On Sunday 30 August 2015, Dropbox went down globally, with users around the world unable to reach the cloud-storage service or their files. The company attributed the disruption to 'an issue that arose during routine internal maintenance,' without giving further technical detail.
The incident also illustrated a recurring problem with outage communications: Dropbox's status page at one point indicated that service had returned to normal while many users were still reporting that they remained locked out, creating a gap between the company's stated status and users' actual experience. The outage was resolved later the same day.
Impact
Coming a little over a year after the lengthy January 2014 outage, the August 2015 incident reinforced concerns about the reliability of a service positioned as always-available infrastructure for files. The premature 'all clear' on the status page drew particular criticism, highlighting how inaccurate status reporting compounds the frustration of an outage for users and IT administrators who depend on it to triage problems.